vmsims23

TS4 TO TS3 TATTOO TUTORIAL BY PURPURA SIMS

Hello wonderful people 🐣 Many have asked me for this tutorial and I hope to be as clear as possible. Although of course I'm always open to answer questions or if something was not explained well

Let's start! 🐤

*Have TS4 and S4Studio installed

*Blender (I'll use 2.79)

*TSRW

*Basic Rigs

*A reference skin, either facial or body (depending on what type of tattoos we want to convert). I usually use the ones that come on the rigs but if you like another skin, go ahead!

*Photoshop or GIMP (in my case I'll use PS)

*DDS NVIDIA Plugin

*A TS3 tattoo from another creator as a base

*A lot of patience lol

--------------------------------------------------------------------

(1) We will open the tattoo file that we want to convert in S4Studio (if you're new and it's the first time that you use this program, click on the "Projects" tab and the file window will open and search for your tattoo)

(2) The only thing we need is the texture, which is commonly called "Diffuse". Follow the steps in the photo and extract the texture. It will be extracted in .PNG format at a resolution of 2048x4096

(3) Open Photoshop and open the skin and tattoo texture file (as in my case I'm going to convert a body tattoo so I'm going to open the skin for the body)

(4) Place the tattoo on the body as close as possible to its original location in TS4. Tattoos in TS3 are almost always in 1024x1024 resolution, which is a much smaller resolution and lower quality than in TS4. What is the problem? Depending on the tattoo, it can look very pixelated when we scale it to fit the body. If you want to convert tattoos with small details or lettering, it can look really bad in your game (an example of this is the Ariana Grande tattoo conversion I did some time ago). I'm not a PS master, so maybe there is a solution for this. But if not, keep in mind that there may be tattoos that you can't turn into good quality and you'll have to give up or settle

(5) Once you have finished positioning the tattoo to your liking on the body, save the file in .dds format (a common format for textures in TS3). Important to save the tattoo image next to the skin (for the moment). DO NOT CLOSE PHOTOSHOP
(6) Open Blender and open a basic rig (in my case it will be female but if it's converting to male open the male rig). Here comes perhaps the slightly confusing part of the tutorial, mainly if you're a beginner and have never touched these Blender options, so I hope to be clear on this. What we are going to do is replace the default texture that comes in the rig and replace it with the one we edited in Phosotshop. Why do we do this that seems unnecessary? Well, actually it isn't. TSRW doesn't usually show tattoos or some makeup/cc that we import, so if we don't do this step we don't really know what the tattoo will look like in the game. And it is really tedious to enter the game over and over again to check if the location of the tattoo is correct, for that reason I do this method to see if I placed the tattoo correctly
(7) As I show in the image below, we must select the body of the rig (afbody) and go to the "texture" tab that has a red and white square as a symbol. Underneath there will be a list of textures such as clothing, skin, etc. We must remove the one from the skin, so we select the second one in the list (afBody_m) and click on the cross indicated below. The body will turn gray as it has no texture

(8) In the "Image" section, two new options will appear. We must click on the "Open" option and look for the texture that we made in Photoshop

(9) In this way we will see how our tattoo turned out. In my case the tattoo is very big (and very pixelated LMAOOO). Here we will need the patience tool because we will have to in my case (and maybe this will happen to you at some point) go back to Photoshop, edit the tattoo, save it again, repeat steps 7 and 8 and so on until we see a satisfactory result

(10) After doing this tedious process and having the tattoo ready, we go back to Photoshop, we are going to make the reference skin layer invisible or delete it and extract the tattoo in .dds format WITH TRANSPARENT BACKGROUND. Make sure this in plugin settings when extracting

Tumblr won't let me post +10 images, so you can find the continuation here
(11) Open TSRW and import the tattoo from another creator that we will use as a base (I don't know if this is ethical or not, sorry, it is that this way it ensures that the tattoo will work).
(12) Open the "texture" tab and then "edit" in the "Multiplier" tab
(13) We import our texture and give it "Done". As I said in TSRW you will not see the tattoo, for that we already did the test in Blender AND IT SHOULD LOOK ALMOST THE SAME AS IT LOOKED THERE.

And finally we export the file and enjoy! 🐤